Cartomythography
by Rosario Santiago
As a child, the classroom globe that sat on my teacher’s desk remained an elusive object. It was a motif in my life, something I saw in my every day, despite not grasping what it meant or what we did with it. I’d touch my hand against it, lightly spinning the globe, the plastic roundness grating against the metallic frame it was propped up in.
“Do you know where you’re from, Rosie?” My teacher asked, eyes flickering between me and the page she was correcting on the table.
“Philadelphia,” I responded, because I had never known anything else.
“No, you’re from here.”
With her hand that still held the red pen, she turned the globe and pointed to a small, brown land-mass the size of her fingertip.
“Here’s Puerto Rico.”
The island looked like a splotch against open blue. I gazed at that same place her finger had rested, that which felt like nothing but was, apparently, everything. My teacher handed back my homework, marked up in blood-like ink, and I returned to my seat.
In this moment I saw the shape of Puerto Rico, and I began to understand it as a separate entity, something different than what I had always considered myself, a Puerto Rican in Philadelphia. When I went back to see the globe, I touched my hand against it, feeling the raised edges of the countries and the borders that separated them, how harsh land gave way to soft seas.
As my teacher rushed us out to lunch, I quickly asked her again, “Where’s Puerto Rico?” With my hand in hers she guided my pointer finger to that spot in the Caribbean, and I rubbed it to feel its textures, its gives, the relief between the tiny island and the ocean surrounding it. To my discovery, there was no difference in sensation. It was ocean, earth, then ocean again, and I could feel the colors, a deep brown encased in blue, yet there was no feel, no give that these two separate things, land and water, were any different at all. It was as if Puerto Rico was ocean, and what was considered my home on this map could easily be confused for a misprint, a discoloration, an anomaly. I left the globe, my finger against Puerto Rico, dragging it behind me as my body moved forward, and when I had finally removed my hand, it was as if I hadn’t touched anything at all.
It continues: if in school I was a tiny land mass on map, then at work I am a book defined by a numerical identity. I find myself surrounded by haphazard integers that I need to memorize, my body dragged up and down the length of bookshelves without looking at any words, instead, wondering if I can count correctly. It is always that - the dragging, the feeling that I am following where someone is telling me to go, taking position in a queue where I fit perfectly, where I cause no disruptions. The call number shocks - the cutter pains, and I wonder myself an existence that lives in that tiny slip of sticky white paper, glued down and sheathed within that clear book-tape.
I think of a time where the call-number on an old book was barely legible. Under the fluorescent lights I tried to make sense of numbers that were no longer there, worn away by humidity and time. As I slowly ripped away the sticker, a separation, I thought, is this not the only home you know? It was that familiar feeling as I brushed the pad of my thumb against the residue left behind, a scarred, patterned molt to a book that now lived in library-limbo.
If I was a map, would I be made of sand-down paper?
Or would I be the numbers, fading as time passes?
Will I ever know what comes between a divot and a landing?
Ask me the question again, and this time I’ll say…
What if maps were not measured by metrical lengths and political borders but by the strings that connect us, my hand in yours, columns carved of ancestry that hold us up-right, tangible futures that tug us forward? Let’s not just stop at maps then; family trees, historical chronology, coming-of-age, classification systems and binaries; I’ll make up my own magic, my own families, my own my own my own. In the map of my being I live at the point where time meets space. Here I fill the cracks and fragments of in-betweens with my own futurities; a Puerto Rico that is free, a boundless book, pages spread. Here my body bursts through the boundaries of numbers, calculating until I break through infinity and then, what comes after? Freedom is a place, and we can map it. Freedom as a geographical location, a legend, a dream we wished and a dream we inhabit. Cartomythography tells us that what we want is not so far out of reach, but that it’s inherently inside of us, waiting to be scribbled down on paper, to be made real and practiced and organic.
Rosario Santiago (they/we) is a Lesbian Boricua writer and library worker based in unceded Lenni Lenape lands. Their writing and research focuses on character subjectivity and queer space-time. You can catch up with them on instagram @comingofagestories.